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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

O'Reilly used to produce the definitive bibles that you were required to own to work on different technologies, but I feel like the quality has gone down over the last 10 years or so. I don't know if that is a byproduct of developers relying on books less, or technology moving faster, or poor publishing decisions. But it has probably contributed more than DRM, one way or the other, to their decline.

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It turns out in 2017 innovators can spread their own knowledge, and sell their own multi-format ebooks in large numbers (keeping most of the revenue).

If I had a tech book in me I'd be trying to steal from Wes Bos's playbook, not get on a call with an O'Reilly editor.

In the 90s their "in a nutshell" books were worth their weight in gold. But you are right that tech is different now. A nutshell book from back then would be good for 5 or 10 years. Now the "shelf life" (haha) is a year at most before tech fashion moves on.

Entirely anecdotally, but that is what slowed me down the past few years. I am not in the industry at all (biologist), so I'm usually very late to development technologies. I tried to pick up Laravel about a year ago, and I just don't like learning from videos, so I tried to find a decent book to get started. Almost every book from O'Reilly has reviews that say the code examples are nearly unusable. I don't really want to spend the time troubleshooting their examples instead of using that time on whatever brought me to the framework in the first place.

Exactly. Take for example the Sendmail book. Probably one of the most important (and feared) sysadmin books of our time. If you had a well worn dog eared copy on your desk, you commanded respect.

The Essential System Administration book was a regular reference for me. Thankfully, I was not the sendmail guy.

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